Depending on the source, Joseph Smith, the founder and First Prophet of Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter Day Saints, was a divinely-inspired spiritual leader whose recurring revelations and
supernatural experiences legitimated his claim to power, a charlatan of incredible pursuasive
abilities, or possibly even a brilliant paranoid schizophrenic. Regardless of the category he is
placed in by historians, Mormon and non-Mormon alike, there can be no
doubt that Smith's story is an extraordinary one. His vision of American history, as evinced in the Book of Mormon, not
only spawned a new religion but provided his followers with a model of an America to which
they could return. In a time of great confusion for America as the new and unstable country,
adrift with little history, sought a collective narrative under which to reside, Joseph Smith gave to
his followers America's past; he gave them the story of a once perfect and
now reclaimable
garden.

Joseph Smith was born 1805 in Sharon, Vermont. Smith is characterized as being literate, but far
from well-educated. His family's hard-scrabble existence led them across
Vermont and
eventually to Rochester, New York; it left little time for the luxury of education, although
Smith's mother recalled his penchant for story-telling as one of the few
things that could uplift
the family.

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Sometime in 1820, Smith's life changed; it was that year that
he experienced the First
Vision:

"The Lord heard me cry in the wilderness and while in the attitude of
calling upon the Lord in the
16th year of my age a pillar of light above the brightness of the sun at noon day come down from
above and rested upon me. I was filled with the spirit of God and the Lord opened the heavens
upon me and I saw the Lord.
He spake unto me saying, Joseph my son thy sins are forgiven thee. Go thy way, walk in my
statutes and keep my commandments. Behold I am the Lord of Glory. I was crucifyed for the
world that all those who believe on my name may have Eternal life. Behold the world lieth in sin
at this time and none doeth good, no not one. They have turned aside from the gospel and keep
not my commandments. They draw near to me with their lips while their hearts are far from me
and mine anger is kindling against the inhabitants of earth to visit them according to their
ungodliness and to bring to pass that which hath been spoken by the mouth of the prophets and
Apostles. Behold and lo, I come quickly as it is written of me, in the cloud clothed in the glory
of my Father."

A year later, Smith reported another vision, one that would decisively shape the rest of his life:

"And it came to pass when I was seventeen years of age, I called again
upon the Lord and he
shewed unto me a heavenly vision. For behold an angel of the Lord came and stood before me.
It was by night and he called me by name and he said the Lord had forgiven me my sins. He
revealed unto me that in the Town of Manchester, Ontario County, New York, there was plates
of gold upon which there was engravings which was engraven by Maroni and his fathers, the
servants of the living God in Ancient days, deposited by the commandments of God and kept by
the power thereof and that I should go and get them. He revealed unto me many things
concerning the inhabitants of the earth which since have been revealed in commandments and
revelations."

What the angel Moroni had further told Smith (as Smith wrote in the later, canonized version of
the visions) was that on these gold plates were the records of the first Americans. Along with
these were two special stones, the Urim and Thummin; Moroni explained that
the possession
and use of these stones were
what constituted seers in ancient or former times, and that God had
prepared them for the pupose of translating the book.

Smith attempted to retrieve the golden plates from the hill in New York; he could not, however,
for another three years. He reported in his journal that the
angel Moroni had refused him access:
"You have not kept the commandments of the Lord which I gave you...And in
his own due time
thou shalt obtain them." Interestingly, during this period Smith and his
father were known in
their area as "treasure-finders" or "money-diggers". Prior to the First
Vision, Joseph found a
"seerstone", a smooth stone "the size but not the shape of a hen's egg."
According to the tenets of
folk magic which were popular in that region
at the time, the seerstone possessed magical powers
which allowed the holder of it to locate lost objects
and precious metals beneath the earth's
surface. Many believed that Smith could not have found the golden plates of Moroni had it not
been for this magical stone.

Once he had gotten hold of the plates in 1827, Smith set about translating them. This was done
in a space of three months, using scribes while Smith
translated from behind a curtain. The end
product told a story, amazing and compelling,
that explained the divine origins of the American
land and people. In Old Testament times,
the family of Lehi came to America. Lehi, descended
from Abraham and carrying not only his family's geneology, but also the
Torah and prophesies
of the Holy Prophets, crossed the
ocean to live far away from the bondage that had enslaved Jews
following the Babylonian attacks of 587 B.C. Upon arriving in this
"choice above all other
lands," the family of Lehi was cleaved in two as the sons of the family
turned against one
another. For six centuries, the Nephites and the Lamanites
fought one another, until Christ's
appearance in America brought the warring bands together. However, this peace lasted only two
hundred years; once again the Nephites and the Lamanites
fell upon each other. This time, all
the Nephites (except Moroni) were extinguished;
Moroni survived to bury the records kept by his
father, Mormon. The Lamanites lost everything of value
in the terrible war, and in time, without
records of their history, forgot that they were the sons of
Isreal; they are, of course, the ancestors
of the American Indian.

This narrative operates in several ways
within an American and Mormon ideology. First and
most obviously, the visions and the story
of the displaced Isreaites creates a communal
understanding among believers; the appearance
of the text itself validates the visions of Joseph
Smith, as the visions validate the text. Many
believed that such inspiration must have been
divine, for surely a five hundred page work such
as the Book of Mormon could not have come
from the mind of a just-literate farm boy, and
that in itself seemed to attest to the powers of
Smith. Although the Book seems fantastic to non-believers,
to those who embraced the
teachings of Smith, the story seemed rational;
it offered a historical, tangibly-based (assuming
the veracity of the golden plates),
Biblically-validated way of looking at America's history at a
crucial time when Americans were questioning their own place in the world.

Further, as America as a whole leaned into the nineteenth
century tenets of Manifest Destiny, the
story of Lehi and his family seemed fairly well in step. These first immigrants to the North
American continent had been assured by God that
they were being sent to "a
land of promise,
which was choice above all other lands, which the Lord God had preserved for a righteous
people....and whatsoever nation shall possess it, shall be so free from bondage, and from
captivity, and from all other nations under heaven, if they but serve the God of the land, who is
Jesus Christ." Explicit in this passage is the image of the Edenic
garden, anyone's for the taking
who will live within the covenent; implicit, however, is the validation
for such acts of nineteenth
century America as the Mexican-American war or the conversion
or extermination of the Native
American tribes--the fallen Lamanites who forget their history and
do not worship the one true
God deserve no better. It is clear that in one way, the promised
land, fallen into the hands of the
Lamanites, has become the Puritans' "howling wilderness" rather than God's
Edenic garden.
Surely a part of the impetus to move westward
was, for the Mormons, not an expansion, but a
reclamation.

As the Mormon religion grew within the United States, Joseph Smith
remained at its head. Not a
remote figure delegating responsibility, Smith continued to
convert new members and presided
over the first move west to Kirtland, Ohio
and the second to Commerce (later Nauvoo), Illinois.
There, he was forced to deal with an increasingly
antagonistic situation; the distaste and even
outright hatred with which much of the rest of the
country seemed to view the Mormons erupted
not infrequently into mob violence, and Smith himself
and his close associates were arrested
more than once on various charges. Near the end
of his life, Smith seemed to style himself in the
role of a dictator over his small kingdom. Aside from being "sealed"
polygynously to over
twenty Mormon women during the last three
years of his life, he also ran for the United States
presidency, destroyed the printing press and business
of a group of Mormon dissenters, and by
mid-June of 1844, declared martial law in Nauvoo.
For this (and other real or imagined
offences), Smith and his brother Hyrum were arrested.
Although they first fled across the
Mississippi River, they both returned three days later and surrendered at Carthage, Illinois. Two
days after their arrest, in jail and under the protection of state marshals, Joseph and Hyrum Smith
were shot to death by a mob.